One Year Since Germany's Nuclear Exit: Renewables Expand, Fossil Fuels Reduced
ise.fraunhofer.de
ise.fraunhofer.de
Going by this chart:
* https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
* Also: https://www.iea.org/countries/germany
* Also also: https://www.iea.org/countries/germany/emissions#what-are-the...
Nuclear was previously providing 22 GW (2022) to 20 GW (2010) of capacity, down to 12.1 GW (2011), then 8 (2019): currently (2023) lignite can output 18.6 GW of capacity, and hard coal is providing 18.9 GW.
For output (per first link), at its peak nuclear provided ~150 TWh, while coal (lignite+hard) provided 120 TWh in 2023.
So AFAICT, coal capacity could have been cut in half (perhaps even not running that often) if existing nuclear was kept around. (New nuclear did not have to be constructed, just keep around the current stuff longer until (a) fossils are retired, and (b) more renwwables are built out).
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Germany was never cheap, it was and is still in the top 5. What you also need to consider in those charts, what is the average salary. While it is comparable to Italy, take a closer look to Hungary how expansive it is there.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267500/eu-monthly-whole...
> what is the average salary
Norway, Finland, Netherlands are still much cheaper and they are rich.
Norway has the terrain for building hydroelectric power plants.
There is a reason the energy companies still keep coal power plants. Without the price and profit would go down.
Pick your quasi-legitimate source, but they all agree that coal is ~10X more deadly than nuclear.
> Coal-fired energy chains are estimated to cause 12 times more deaths per gigawatt-ampere-year than nuclear energy chains, and coal is estimated to cause 820% more deaths per terawatt-hour of electricity produced than nuclear
I prefer solutions that don't emit poisonous substances into the atmosphere nor make areas dangerous for thousands of years in case of accidents.
After ~250 years spent nuclear fuel is only dangerous if you (a) eat it, or (b) grind it up and snort it like cocaine.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx0p6QLMpg4
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2t2tYQsK94
The long-lived stuff throws off mostly alpha particles (blocked by a sheet of paper) or beta particles (thin aluminium). The first few years (6-10) of spent fuel throws off the riskiest particles (gamma), and so the fuel sits in cooling pools for that period.
The co-founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, Geraldine Thomas, has no problem with nuclear power: "Look at the science – smoking and obesity are more harmful than radiation":
* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-...
If an existing nuclear plant was shuttered while a coal plant was still running, that was the choice.
Operate: PreussenElektra, EnBW, Vattenfall, RWE, EWN.
Or was that a rhetorical question for a solution with a zero catastrophic failure rate (in Germany)?
Siemens can't even built proper WEC, what's the nuclear equivalent of blade breakage on wind turbine?
Are you familiar with functional safety classification and how this affects the development of systems? Would you draw conclusions from the failure rate of Siemens vacuum cleaners to the company's capability of building fission reactors?
Now add the long history of Siemens briberies and the trust in that company goes to zero.
Whomever runs the nuclear power plants in Ontario, Canada, where I live:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Canada#O...
* https://www.ieso.ca/Learn/Ontario-Electricity-Grid/Supply-Mi...
* https://ieso.ca/power-data § "Supply" tab
I live and work <50km from a nuclear power station.
Nuclear fuel market is global with many producers. Fuel price is a tiny fraction of the nuclear electricity cost. Agree to a long-term contract at double today's price and there will be a line of companies running to sign it.
Cameco (and others) put some of their nuclear mining into conservation because there was not enough buyers. Uranium is one of the most abundant elements, the only reason for the shortage of fuel is the politicians reluctance to make nuclear a pillar of the energy production.
Then switch to Niger or Namibia (where France partly gets theirs from), or Canada, or Australia.
It's not a coincidence that the German prime minister from the era when they decided to phase out nuclear now works for Gazprom and Rosneft. He literally said the West caused Russia to invade Georgia in 2008 (what a fucking moron).
In normal countries this is called treason. In Germany it's "developing trade relations".
Germany alone, using PV alone, has the potential to supply the entire planet's electricity demand 3.5 times over, even when using medium efficiency cells and also accounting for their capacity factor.
Meeting just Germany's own domestic demand purely with PV would take 0.8% of the land area: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28514.6e9+kWh%2F1+y...
This is about a tenth of the land area that's already been built on: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/lan_lcv_ovw/d...
Also, this ignores the ample German wind resources that currently supplies a bit over twice as much as their PV, with all renewables collectively being 52% of Germany's gross electricity production: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris...
Of course, the people doing this might have simply not believed that any of this was possible, and had some villainous scheme in mind that accidentally went wrong in a way that gave everyone else substantial benefits — I've still not seen "The Mouse That Roared", but I'm aware of the plot and have that in mind.
You must not forget that Gerhard Schröder won the 2002 election by promising that Germany won't join the USA in invading the Iraq, a promise that many German citizens venerate him for. For basically everyone in Germany it was obvious that Putin is a criminal, but the mood in German society at that time was that the Iraq invasion of George W. Bush was to be considered a genocide. So, having a choice between continuing being aligned with a nation/president who wants Germans to join a genocide vs seeking alignment with a criminal, Schröder's politics of seeking rapprochement with Russia/Putin was rather well-regarded in the German society.
On the other hand Germany is aiming to building out 13 GW of solar in just 2024 (capacity factors non-withstanding).
And coal is 25-30% currently.
If nuclear was higher, how much lower could have coal have been? How much lower could have emissions be without coal?
Don't tell that to Ontario-Canada
> Demand for electricity across Canada is forecast to double in the next 25 years, and all the signs from Ontario Premier Doug Ford's government indicate that nuclear energy will supply the biggest portion of the province's additional power needs.
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-nuclear-power...
and Poland:
> In December 2021, BWXT Canada signed an agreement, valued at up to $1 billion, to build key components in Ontario to support the deployment of Small Modular Reactors in Poland.
* https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1004711/ontario-lands-maj...
> German society didn't want to be stuck with it and footing a tremendous bill for subsidizing and later dismantling the technology in the end.
Ontario is not dismantling but refurbishing:
* https://www.opg.com/releases/opg-celebrates-the-early-comple...
The bill is such that nuclear is the second-cheapest source of power in Ontario (Table 2):
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2023...
What do you mean by "legacy technology"?
> German society didn't want to be stuck with it and footing a tremendous bill for subsidizing and later dismantling the technology in the end.
Renewables have received 120 billion in subsidies last year.
Germany probably paid much more dearly for the closure of plants that could have operated for another decades.
> Pretty much all industrialized countries with the exception of China is going in the same direction.
Or they do wishful thinking on renewables. It depends on the point of view in the end.
"A 2020 report by IRENA9 tracked some $634 billion in energy-sector subsidies in 2020, and found that around 70% went to fossil fuels. Only 20% went to renewable power generation, 6% to biofuels and just over 3% to nuclear. “This overwhelming imbalance of subsidies between fossil fuels and clean energy is a drag on us achieving the Paris climate goals,” says Taylor, who wrote the report. The balance of these numbers varies from year to year, because fossil-fuel subsidies swing around depending largely on the price of oil, he adds."
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02847-2#:~:text=A...
Among other things, it is important to note that more than half of that money comes from the EU.
China also spends a lot on subsidies for their solar industry (at least this is often mentioned).
No. Germany is not even using its full potential for electrical energy at the moment.
> Nuclear was previously providing 22 GW (2022) to 20 GW (2010) of power, down to 12.1 GW (2011), then 8 (2019): currently (2023) lignite is outputing 18.6 GW of power, and hard coal is providing 18.9 GW.
Those numbers are irrelevant, they are not telling the usage. You can't freely replace one energy-source with some other. You need to look at the application and which energy-form it can use. And in Germany, the big historical problem is that the conversion to electrical applications was slow.
Edit post to note capacity versus output:
* nuclear was providing 150 TWh at its peak (~2004)
* coal is currently providing 120 TWh
So nuclear could have covered all the output of coal, and then some.
* https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
As an EE, I do not understand "different form of energy". How are the electrons and EM fields different between nuclear and coal generation?
As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, we got rid of all of our coal in 2014 and have lots of nuclear:
Renewables obviously have some dependability problems (the sun might not be shining one day, the wind might not be blowing). These can be dealt with, but it isn’t free, it should be seen as an engineering opportunity.
I did an EE degree, but was more interested in digital and electronics stuff. But they talked enough about the grid a bit in my intro classes before everyone specialized… I’m confused that somebody would respond “as an EE” and ignore the grid. Everyone knew we were hiding a lot behind the circle with the little sin wave on it.
This thread is generally talking about electricity, and give that most 'traditional' methods of generation involve boiling water to make steam, there's nothing special about coal or atoms generating the heat.
Dispatchability is an important element of the grid, but that is also possible with nuclear: one can keep the reactor thermally running, but have mechanisms to divert the generated steam away from the turbines and quench it. Given the up-front capex (and low marginal cost of megawatts) of nuclear this is not economically ideal, but it is not technically impossible.
Well, ok, then here is an ELI5: If you have a stove, running with coal, then you can't use electricity to fuel it. You need to buy a new stove, which is able to run with electricity. And if some of those stoves are very expensive stoves, running in an industrial complex or a chemical plant, then you need to invest a very high amount of money to replace the parts of the complex or plant.
> As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, we got rid of all of our coal in 2014 and have lots of nuclear:
Is that the same Canada who sold their uranium-mining or nuclear rod-productions to Russia?
[Edit: in another comment in this sub-thread.]
> Is that the same Canada who sold their uranium-mining or nuclear rod-productions to Russia?
No, this one:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McArthur_River_uranium_mine
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigar_Lake_mine
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_River,_Ontario#Economy
What are those? Nuclear and renewables uses are indeed very different. Nuclear and coal for base load -- not so much. At least this is what I heard for decades. I would be interested to read a refutation.
So the >9 GW of power provided 24/7 by nuclear on the "Supply" tab is a figment of imagination?
And yes, coal is also used to compensate for fluctuations, but those are only very little numbers. AFAIK the harm from having nuclear plants idling around is far bigger.
What do you mean by "chemical processes"? What about burning coal is different than burning natural/methane gas for these "chemical processes"?
How is the heat from coal different than the heat from gas or nuclear? Is not water boiled to generate steam in all cases?
If coal seems to be special/different, and not replaceable by other generation forms, why is the plan to get rid of it?
* https://www.euractiv.com/section/coal/news/coal-phase-out-ge...
* https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-shut-down-seven...
Coal is using in chemical processes for smelting, producing steel and other metals, creating concrete and other chemical compounds.
> If coal seems to be special/different, and not replaceable by other generation forms, why is the plan to get rid of it?
Because the plans are about replacing whole processes, fabrics, plants, devices, products... It's not as simple as just switching a cable or making a new contract with a new provider. You basically have to build a new house, and that's time-consuming and expensive.
Canada has lots of steel/metal production, and yet Ontario and Quebec (two largest local production centres), have managed to either not have coal in the first place or get rid of it.
Ontario gave a timeline to retire coal, and there's no reason why Germany could not have done the same:
* https://www.ontario.ca/page/end-coal
This would have reduced emissions and improve air quality.
Germany has built a tremendous amount of solar and wind in the past few years, but the amount of energy they're generating is exaggerated a lot when one talks about percentages.
In reality, over the past 5 or so years as the last of the nuclear reactors were decommissioned and solar/wind installations have ramped up, the total amount of electricity produced in Germany has decreased, and Germany has moved from on average being an electricity exporter to being an electricity importer.
The reduction in total electrical power generated in Germany is about equal to the power lost from nuclear reactors, while the reductions in fossil fuels was more or less balanced by the increase in renewables.
This is pretty promising, and in my opinion, it's actually somewhat good that Germany is a net electricity importer rather than exporter. They shouldn't be selling power generated with coal when they could be buying power generated with nuclear (France) or hydroelectric (Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Austria).
Not from a national security perspective.
The more electrified Europe becomes, the less reliant they are on fuels imported from rivals outside the EU.
Besides, climate change is *also* a gigantic national security risk, more pressing than any regional rivalry.
Then, they should not have gotten rid of Nuclear because it's way more efficient than Wind and Solar. No need to give up arable land either to put in giant solar and wind farms.
Why ad hominem attacks? I didn't do it to you.
I said that you are making Germany's stupid decision to decommission their nuclear reactors sound worse than it actually is.
National security != Europe security. There is no European Military. It's a loose confederation each with their own borders. Its not like the US.
There is no EU military, but there are mutual defense pacts, and the development of a real EU military is something that is being pushed for by Germany.
That sounds counter to what you said above
"reduces their dependence on fossil fuels from Russia, the USA and the middle east, shifting those dependencies from rivals to their closest allies"
The US is one of their closest allies. It appears you are conflicting yourself.
Putting the US in the list of rivals is a bit of a silly rhetorical flair I think. We aren’t rivals. We are close allies. But the EU as a whole is a friendly competitor to the US. Germany has a shared destiny with their EU partners. The US, we’re very close allies to Germany and the EU. But we aren’t conjoined.
Because of this, EU countries are working rather hard to try and insulate themselves from potential changes in their relationship with the USA (hence the big focus on an EU military and strategic autonomy).
I get it, as I responded in the other comment the Germany and their EU partners share a fate. It’s definitely closer than EU/US. But the US/EU relationship is more like friendly competition than rivalry.
Because of that, it is a national security risk for EU countries to rely on the USA for critical energy inputs, in the same way as it is a national security risk for the EU to rely on Russia or the Middle East for energy inputs, in a way that just isn't true of fellow EU or EEA countries.
Except that Germany was importing energy from the Soviet Union since (at least) the 1980s:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhhorod_pipeli...
and then Russia. Was that good for national security?
Non-diverse, import leaning energy is a security risk.
Considering the enormous variability and unpredictability of the German market, this doesn't seem like a big deal. In this regard, Sweden has refused to build a new energy connection.
"We can't connect southern Sweden, which has a large deficit in electricity production, with Germany, where the electricity market today does not function efficiently," Energy Minister Ebba Busch said in a statement.
"That would risk leading to higher prices and a more unstable electricity market in Sweden," she said.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/swedish-government-s...
https://www.epexspot.com/en/market-data?market_area=DE-LU&au...
But from what I can tell, they're doing a pretty good job reducing their usage of fossil fuel? Can someone clarify.
Yes, power is more expensive in Germany. Yes they have periods where they don't produce all the power they consume, yes the import nuclear power. But for their goals of reducing fossil fuel consumption and not building nuclear power plants they seem to be doing well?
On the other hand France as the complete opposite example, it has a nationalized electricity company because it can't survive otherwise. They lobbied hard (successfully) for rule changes in the EU so they are able to fund their nuclear plants through government subsides. We are talking hundreds of billions for their plans to keep old plants alive and build new ones. This will not be on the bill, so the prices are not a realistic comparison.
But even with all that, the price in France is 24c as far as I know. In Germany you can get it for as low as 19c per kwh [1], but you only get a two month price guarantee and can get hit if the market prices spike again. Your choice.
[1] http://energie.check24.de/strom/vergleich/check24/?product_i...
* https://web.archive.org/web/20240515172653/http://ise.fraunh...
That tinges the interpretation of this press release. It isn't all smiles and sunshine in the German electricity market.
EDIT In fact, you can add China to the graphs and note that OWID thinks China generates more electricity per-capita than Germany does as of last year. Who'd have thought that was possible 40 years ago!
2) Germany's electricity prices have come down and stabilized. They're actually lower than before the war now. No longer the highest in the EU, though there is still room for it to come down more, but it'll take time as more renewables, batteries, and long-distance grid connectors are built out.
Although in the case of Germany I'll be impressed if their QoL stays high. The trends are bad.
The thing I wanted to point out though is that the amount of energy used by Germans hasn't actually changed very much, it's decreased a little, but nothing like what would be suggested by the generation figures. This is just because mainland europe actually has a more integrated and interconnected electrical grid than the USA does, and Germany is importing a lot of energy.
> It'd be like a country importing all their manufactured goods - that would reflect badly on a country's manufacturing sector even if their overall quality of life was high.
In this case, it'd be like if a country decided to do something about the fact that some manufactured good they were producing was toxic, and so they lowered the amount they produce of that good, and substitute it with imports while they also rapidly ramp up their ability to produce a non-toxic alternative.
And electricity is now sold by private companies. Let's change that to make prices lower.
Between Germany and China, I feel I'd rather be copying China's policies.
First they simply use less power than before.
Second they import nuclear power from France for reliability.
Seems kinda silly to me.
In general I don't see a problem. Germany doesn't want nuclear because it considers it a bad deal. France thinks it's good so it sells it to Germany, and Germany buys it because it's cheaper than producing from coal domestically. Everyone should be happy.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
Anyway people that talk about import from one country to another just show that they don't what they talk about. For example Danemark is a net importer for 2023, so it doesn't make any sense to say that most of Germany electricity import comes from Danemark, it actually comes from Norway and Sweden and Danemark is just passing it through. You would have to use flow tracing to get how much each country provide, but if there is 2 way to count flow there many more to do flow tracing. What is important is net position.
> The physical electricity flows do not provide any information on whether the electricity was actually consumed in the country or whether it was forwarded to neighbouring countries as transit electricity.
So when people talk about imports and exports, they usually talk about who paid who (electricity trade).
Sweden and Norway are already listed. I suppose it's possible someone in Denmark was buying from the Scandinavian countries and sold it to Germany, I don't know how the markets, bidding zones etc work in detail. But even in that case it was not really buying that much French nuclear.
And again, even if it was I don't see a real problem. Germany thinks it's a bad deal to have them running, but if France thinks it can make it work, sure. Sounds like a win-win.
Some numbers at:
neither are silly.
How large are those power lines going from scandinavia to Germany? Afaik we already have issues getting north and south Germany properly connected. It doesn't help that there where reports of "greenwashing" in the past where power companies would trade local coal power for hydroelectric power from the other side on the planet so they could put a 100% green energy seal on their offering.
But that's the beauty of climate activism: As long as the emissions are happening somewhere else they don't count.
You kill your own industry and just import everything from China, where they use dirt cheap and very dirty energy from brown coal, but, hey, it does not count towards our carbon footprint.
___________________________________
Edit: Removed a false claim on my part that Germany exported more to Poland than it imports. I maintain however that the amount imported from Poland is not significant.
>A considerably strong increase of electricity imports to Germany is seen from Poland. Starting at a lower level, the Polish electricity import rose by 400 percent in 2021, compared to previous year. [1]
..and that was / is coal power.
Media critical of the nuclear exit here in Germany pointed out that the immediate solution to the disappearence of German nuclear power from the network was to increase energy imports, namely more nuclear power from France and more coal power from Poland, which made the whole move even more questionable.
[1] https://www.eupd-research.com/en/conventional-electricity-im...
However, if you look here: https://energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.htm?l=... you'll see that in 2023, Germany exported 3.57 TWh of power to Poland, and imported 3.05 TWh, which is not very much.
For context, Germany imported 63.7 TWh of electricity in total in 2023, so the amount coming from Poland is indeed quite small.
That's the effect of strangling their heavy industry via higher energy prices.
Nuclear energy exit did not lead to more coal consumption - that was due to sudden switching off of Russian gas in response to their illegal war of aggression against Ukraine.
In the end, there is exactly ONE reason why Germany really went through with leaving nuclear and it is not the anti-nuclear crowd. It is simply cost and money in the face of much cheaper, less risky and heavily abundant renewable energy.
You cannot make an argument for building new plants which will take 10-20 years of realization and billions of Euros when nobody is going to insure it and when we can add massive amounts of MWh of cheap, reliable and safe energy in the mean time.
It is economically irresponsible and makes no sense at all. The mistake of leaving nuclear before coal was made long ago, and yes it was a mistake based on anti-nuclear ideology. But it is equally irrational to try and fix that now in face of clearly better alternatives. You have to actively deny cost analysis data and developments in energy tech over the last decade to keep arguing for nuclear power.
Adding to that, Germany still has no suitable location for a final depot for storing nuclear waste, and the unquantifiable cost to maintain such a depot for tens of thousand of years is often swept under the rug by nuclear supporters.
the ml at the end of the link is missing
I guess with renewables, their growth can be a lot faster than nuclear because building nuclear power plants is a massive centralized undertaking, where as renewables, especially solar, is nimble and incrementally deployable.
So while nuclear seems good, it is logistically a nightmare and it is inflexible.
Where as renewables is decentralized and nimble.
I hadn't thought about it that way before.
I suspect not.
see sibling comments for access to the article.
also
> "In fact, electricity generation from nuclear power was replaced by renewable electricity generation. In the first year without nuclear power, around 270 TWh of renewable electricity was generated, 33 TWh more than in the same period last year. Our electricity mix is cleaner than ever before," explains Prof. Bruno Burger, who is responsible for Fraunhofer ISE's energy-charts data platform. Between April 2023 and April 2024, renewable energy accounted for 58.8 percent of the electrical load, the sum of net public electricity consumption and grid losses, in Germany.
First, the Germany indeed has significantly reduced its reliance on fossil fuels.
But this is not a one-parameter optimization for the country. For decades, Germany was also a center of advanced manufacturing in Europe, one of the very few places able to compete with Chinese manufacturing due to the quality of its manufacturing. It was everywhere: national champions, large factories, small companies, interconnected into a web of excellence.
That, I think, is slowly unraveling and expensive energy is a strong reason for it although definitely not the only one. I have recently met (on hikes and trips) three former owners of small-ish German manufacturers who sold their businesses "because running manufacturing in Germany is not great now" and expected the new owners to move production overseas. New owners bought for established, multi-year orders and being able to stamp the old company name on the products.
This is a very slow process that runs over decades and while the numbers in the study are undoubtedly correct, the reduction in availability of inexpensive, predictably priced energy from the nuclear exit likely accelerates the reduction of Germany manufacturing might. I would love to be wrong, we shall see in another 10-15 years. My 2c.